Sandy Turner: Where I go, accidents just follow

He’s the first one to read my column each week as my proofreader. It’s really difficult to get a reaction out of him since he’s already experienced everything I write about.

Many of our daily discussions happen while I’m cooking dinner. I was picking his brain for a column topic this week. Sometimes it’s hard to think about what I’m going to write about, especially if I can’t remember what I did yesterday. Claiming he could write a series of columns on having to deal with me, I immediately wanted to know what he meant by that comment. Taking that as his cue to leave the kitchen, he just smiled and said, “think about it and get back to me.”

What are you saying, I asked him for the third time, do you mean I’m easy to deal with or would these columns of yours be a sob story. Finally he stopped moving and pointed to the front of my shirt where three slices of cucumber skin were now residing. “Now you have your answer,” he said.

I certainly can’t argue his point as he does have to deal with some oddities I seem to have. Besides being extremely accident prone, the weird but true cloud follows me around. I can’t say all of these things happen with no fault of my own, since the cucumber skin did land on my shirt because I was peeling one. What one could consider weird is I was clueless they were there the entire time I was trying to understand his remark of “having to deal with me.”

From breaking nearly all of the larger appliances at one time or another to causing the first and only dent in his 10-year-old pickup truck, if there’s a will, there’s a way, when it comes to my capability for destroying something. It’s never intentional, it just happens.

After having successfully managed not to keep the new iPhone intact, it was decided a new work cell phone would be purchased. I always feel bad we have to pay the extra money for insurance coverage on these phones, but in the past it’s turned out to be a good thing they were covered. Even with the hard plastic casings he puts on them for me, it’s amazing how much damage can be done to these cell phones with just a few accidental drops.

He’s much more technical savvy than I am, although I try to always act like I know what I’m doing which usually backfires after I push too many or the wrong buttons at one time. Asking if I wanted to read the manual or watch the online tutorial, I laughed as I grabbed the phone at stuck it in my pocket.

Page 2 of 2 - The phone rang and since I didn’t know how to answer it, I began my usual fluster of frustration, hitting every button I could find. Somehow I changed the setting for language from English to Japanese. Even if I knew how to change it back I couldn’t because I couldn’t read anything on the screen.

For the next hour he tried to decipher Japanese and when he started looking like he couldn’t deal with it I suggested he read the manual. He simply just gave me back the phone and said deal with it.

Sandy Turner lives in Independence. Email her at sandydownhome@hotmail.com